I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the specification
on the web site. Not only will it be convenient for those who wish to peruse
the
spec using a kindle, it will be helpful for marketing etc.
The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people tend to
equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be taken seriously.
But if I put a price on it, people will be demotivated to continue contributing
to it, because they'll perceive someone else profiting from their work.
Perhaps proceeds from it should be put towards other promotions of D, like
maybe
a conference? More contests with prizes?
What do you all think? $0? $4.99? $9.99?
And yes, the content will be identical to that on the website, just formatted
for the kindle.

I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the
specification on the web site. Not only will it be convenient for those who
wish to peruse the spec using a kindle, it will be helpful for marketing
etc.
The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people
tend to equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be taken
seriously.
But if I put a price on it, people will be demotivated to continue
contributing to it, because they'll perceive someone else profiting from
their work.
Perhaps proceeds from it should be put towards other promotions of D, like
maybe a conference? More contests with prizes?
What do you all think? $0? $4.99? $9.99?
And yes, the content will be identical to that on the website, just
formatted for the kindle.

--001636b42e14e9de0004a7350023
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
I think free is best.<div>D is seriously lacking free learning resources.</=
div><div>And free does not necessarily mean crap, although the current spec=
ification needs a bit of fixing here and there.<br><br><div class=3D"gmail_=
quote">
On Sun, Jul 3, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Walter Bright <span dir=3D"ltr">&lt;<a href=
=3D"mailto:newshound2 digitalmars.com" target=3D"_blank">newshound2 digital=
mars.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=
=3D"margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the specifica=
tion on the web site. Not only will it be convenient for those who wish to =
peruse the spec using a kindle, it will be helpful for marketing etc.<br>
<br>
The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people ten=
d to equate free with &quot;crap&quot;. It needs to have a price on it to b=
e taken seriously.<br>
<br>
But if I put a price on it, people will be demotivated to continue contribu=
ting to it, because they&#39;ll perceive someone else profiting from their =
work.<br>
<br>
Perhaps proceeds from it should be put towards other promotions of D, like =
maybe a conference? More contests with prizes?<br>
<br>
What do you all think? $0? $4.99? $9.99?<br>
<br>
And yes, the content will be identical to that on the website, just formatt=
ed for the kindle.<br>
</blockquote></div><br></div>
--001636b42e14e9de0004a7350023--

I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the
specification on the web site. Not only will it be convenient for those
who wish to peruse the spec using a kindle, it will be helpful for
marketing etc.
The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people
tend to equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be
taken seriously.
But if I put a price on it, people will be demotivated to continue
contributing to it, because they'll perceive someone else profiting from
their work.
Perhaps proceeds from it should be put towards other promotions of D,
like maybe a conference? More contests with prizes?
What do you all think? $0? $4.99? $9.99?
And yes, the content will be identical to that on the website, just
formatted for the kindle.

I think free is better. Maybe promote it as "Open" ("Open Specification"
or whatever) instead of free, that sounds more like Open Source (often
of high quality) than Freeware (often crap) ;-)
If you sell information that is otherwise (legally) available for free
people may feel ripped off - which would damage D's reputation much more
than an eBook that some people may not take seriously because it's for
free. (And people who think that way will probably not take a compiler
that comes for free seriously either.)
Giving away an eBook for free is not the same as thrusting a
book/magazine in peoples hand on a trade show or after a speech or
something (whether they want it or not) - as long as it's not advertised
with popup-ads or something - they (can) actively choose to download it.
And please provide that ebook as PDF or whatever on the D homepage so
people with other ebook readers (or iPads) can use it as well. :-)
Cheers,
- Daniel

Giving away an eBook for free is not the same as thrusting a
book/magazine in peoples hand on a trade show or after a speech or
something (whether they want it or not) - as long as it's not advertised
with popup-ads or something - they (can) actively choose to download it.

Surprisingly, I have seen this done many times, and have not detected any
backlash or bad feeling about it. The git manual comes to mind.
http://progit.org/book/

And please provide that ebook as PDF or whatever on the D homepage so
people with other ebook readers (or iPads) can use it as well. :-)

Andrei's already set up the dpl source to auto-build pdf's.
In any case, pdf's suck as an ebook format. The trouble is, they don't reflow
the text. The ebook formats are much, much more suitable. Pdf's are for
printing.

Giving away an eBook for free is not the same as thrusting a
book/magazine in peoples hand on a trade show or after a speech or
something (whether they want it or not) - as long as it's not advertised
with popup-ads or something - they (can) actively choose to download it.

Surprisingly, I have seen this done many times, and have not detected
any backlash or bad feeling about it. The git manual comes to mind.
http://progit.org/book/

I see. Kind of surprising on the Internet, which is full of people just
waiting for a reason to complain and flame.
Maybe it also depends on the "history" and quality of the book - is it a
book that was later made available for free? Is it a "real book" or just
a bunch of related documents thrown together?
However: If this is common practice maybe we don't have to expect a
shit-storm.
And I like the idea that the proceeds may be used to organize a D
conference (preferably in Europe ;-)) or for (prizes for) contests.

And please provide that ebook as PDF or whatever on the D homepage so
people with other ebook readers (or iPads) can use it as well. :-)

Andrei's already set up the dpl source to auto-build pdf's.
In any case, pdf's suck as an ebook format. The trouble is, they don't
reflow the text. The ebook formats are much, much more suitable. Pdf's
are for printing.

Ok, I don't really know what kinds of other formats are available and
how well they work, because I don't have an eBook-reader myself.
I thought PDF was common because at least everybody can display it and
formatting isn't screwed up by.
But being able to reflow the text is certainly an important feature if
you want to use it on displays of different size or if you want to
change the fontsize.
Cheers,
- Daniel

Ok, I don't really know what kinds of other formats are available and
how well they work, because I don't have an eBook-reader myself.
I thought PDF was common because at least everybody can display it and
formatting isn't screwed up by.

PDF works great if your e-reader has an 8.5*11 size viewing area. Alas, none of
them do.

But being able to reflow the text is certainly an important feature if
you want to use it on displays of different size or if you want to
change the fontsize.

I recently bought a science "ebook" that turned out to be a pdf of the print
version. It is frankly unreadable on any ebook devices. The only way I could
read it was to throw it up on my 28" desktop monitor.
(It was a good book regardless of the cluelessness of the author on how to do
an
ebook.)

I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the
specification on the web site. Not only will it be convenient for those
who wish to peruse the spec using a kindle, it will be helpful for
marketing etc.
The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people
tend to equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be
taken seriously.
But if I put a price on it, people will be demotivated to continue
contributing to it, because they'll perceive someone else profiting from
their work.
Perhaps proceeds from it should be put towards other promotions of D,
like maybe a conference? More contests with prizes?
What do you all think? $0? $4.99? $9.99?
And yes, the content will be identical to that on the website, just
formatted for the kindle.

I hope it will not be limited to the Kindle and Amazon.
--
/Jacob Carlborg

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 3:11 AM, Walter Bright <newshound2 digitalmars.com
<mailto:newshound2 digitalmars.com>> wrote:
I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the
specification on the web site.
Forgive my stupidity, but what exact content are we talking about here? The
language and library references?

What about skipping Amazon and putting it up on
d-programming-language.org and ask for donations? I think Paypal will
handle the processing for you for free if you show you're not doing it
for profit.
If you set a price we'd have to go through each page and clean them up /
update some for D2, etc... Donations make it nice because you can
release newer versions and donaters can update their copy without paying
again.

What about skipping Amazon and putting it up on d-programming-language.org and
ask for donations? I think Paypal will handle the processing for you for free
if
you show you're not doing it for profit.

People at the airport press a "free gift" on me, and then harangue me for a
donation. I think that's the wrong image for D. People shouldn't be made to
feel
guilty about using D and not making a donation. I know it would turn me off, at
least.

If you set a price we'd have to go through each page and clean them up / update
some for D2, etc... Donations make it nice because you can release newer
versions and donaters can update their copy without paying again.

What about skipping Amazon and putting it up on
d-programming-language.org and
ask for donations? I think Paypal will handle the processing for you
for free if
you show you're not doing it for profit.

People at the airport press a "free gift" on me, and then harangue me
for a donation. I think that's the wrong image for D. People shouldn't
be made to feel guilty about using D and not making a donation. I know
it would turn me off, at least.

Yeah, I suppose. I guess if you follow the progit model (like you
suggested) and said "Support the D community!" that would essentially be
the same thing

If you set a price we'd have to go through each page and clean them up
/ update
some for D2, etc... Donations make it nice because you can release newer
versions and donaters can update their copy without paying again.

The idea is to generate the ebook automatically from the web sources.

Right, but there are some pages that need updating. The FAQ (from a
recent NG post), is one. The "Handling errors" page probably needs some
examples. The DLL example code is outdated as well IIRC. I just think
guaranteeing that purchasers can get more up-to-date versions as pages
are tweaked would be a nice touch, and I'm not sure how well Amazon
handles that.

If you set a price we'd have to go through each page and clean them up
/ update
some for D2, etc... Donations make it nice because you can release newer
versions and donaters can update their copy without paying again.

The idea is to generate the ebook automatically from the web sources.

Right, but there are some pages that need updating. The FAQ (from a recent NG
post), is one. The "Handling errors" page
probably needs some examples. The DLL example code is outdated as well IIRC. I
just think guaranteeing that purchasers
can get more up-to-date versions as pages are tweaked would be a nice touch,
and I'm not sure how well Amazon handles that.

The pages need to be updated completely independently from any book that may
or may not be published and independently
from any amount that might be charged. It's a matter of time/resources.
Please submit bug report and/or pull requests
with proposed changes.
Later,
Brad

I wasn't complaining about the current quality. I just wanted to point
out if the site were to be packaged up and sold there should be a easy
way for purchasers to get an updated version as the site gets cleaned up.

What about skipping Amazon and putting it up on
d-programming-language.org and
ask for donations? I think Paypal will handle the processing for you for
free if
you show you're not doing it for profit.

People at the airport press a "free gift" on me, and then harangue me for
a donation. I think that's the wrong image for D. People shouldn't be made
to feel guilty about using D and not making a donation. I know it would
turn me off, at least.

What about skipping Amazon and putting it up on
d-programming-language.org and ask for donations? I think Paypal will
handle the processing for you for free if you show you're not doing it
for profit.

People at the airport press a "free gift" on me, and then harangue me for
a donation. I think that's the wrong image for D. People shouldn't be made
to feel guilty about using D and not making a donation. I know it would
turn me off, at least.

You can do it in a tasteful manner, without playing the guilt card. A price-
pot for competitions sounds like a good idea. Think of it this way: you
enable people to contribute to D with money instead of time and expertise,
something that is not that easy to do right now.

If you set a price we'd have to go through each page and clean them up
/ update
some for D2, etc... Donations make it nice because you can release newer
versions and donaters can update their copy without paying again.

The idea is to generate the ebook automatically from the web sources.

Right, but there are some pages that need updating. The FAQ (from a recent NG
post), is one. The "Handling errors" page
probably needs some examples. The DLL example code is outdated as well IIRC. I
just think guaranteeing that purchasers
can get more up-to-date versions as pages are tweaked would be a nice touch,
and I'm not sure how well Amazon handles that.

The pages need to be updated completely independently from any book that may or
may not be published and independently
from any amount that might be charged. It's a matter of time/resources.
Please submit bug report and/or pull requests
with proposed changes.
Later,
Brad

The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people tend
to
equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be taken seriously.

Maybe older people equate free with "bad", but newer generations are used to
find good content for free on Internet. Is D designed for older people, people
used to C and C++, that hate JavaScript?
Bye,
bearophile

The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people
tend to equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be
taken seriously.

Maybe older people equate free with "bad", but newer generations are used
to find good content for free on Internet. Is D designed for older people,
people used to C and C++, that hate JavaScript?

There's a difference between free on the internet and a free book. Most people
expect things on the internet to be free and books to cost money. And as soon
as you're dealing with something that normally costs money being free, many
people think that free item is junk or a scam of some kind. How prevalent such
thinking would be about an e-book on D, I don't know. But there's a definite
difference between free online and a free book.
- Jonathan M Davis

Free books does not mean free eBooks. A free book takes money to create every
copy, so it can be assumed that if it's free, they are making their money some
other way (i.e. they are selling you something indirectly). But a free eBook
does not require money per copy to produce, so its quality cannot be judged
based on the price (either way, check out alphascript publishing).

Cannot be? Sure. But it is. There were some recent articles about how Amazon is
being flooded with junk ebooks, and that a lot of people seem to be filtering
them based on price.

How about this, if you charge any amount of money more than 0, I guarantee you
will have less than 10% of the downloads than if you gave it away for free.
Plus
you will alienate people who think they bought an actual D book (or worse,
think
they are getting a deal on Andrei's book) and feel like chumps. That should be
great for D's image :P

Free books does not mean free eBooks. A free book takes money to
create every
copy, so it can be assumed that if it's free, they are making their
money some
other way (i.e. they are selling you something indirectly). But a free
eBook
does not require money per copy to produce, so its quality cannot be
judged
based on the price (either way, check out alphascript publishing).

Cannot be? Sure. But it is. There were some recent articles about how
Amazon is being flooded with junk ebooks, and that a lot of people seem
to be filtering them based on price.

Maybe older people equate free with "bad", but newer generations are
used to find good content for free on Internet. Is D designed for older
people, people used to C and C++, that hate JavaScript?

There's a difference between free on the internet and a free book.

Exactly. It may not make rational sense, but it's true.
Free books are regarded today like free software was 20 years ago - it
must be crap.

This does not hold for technical documentation. For TDPL yes, but not for a
programming language specification.
This view is also losing ground for programming books. There are a quite a
few high quality books distributed online for free, even with a paper
publishing deal.

Maybe older people equate free with "bad", but newer generations are
used
to find good content for free on Internet. Is D designed for older
people,
people used to C and C++, that hate JavaScript?

There's a difference between free on the internet and a free book.

Exactly. It may not make rational sense, but it's true.
Free books are regarded today like free software was 20 years ago - it
must be crap.

Free books does not mean free eBooks. A free book takes money to create
every copy, so it can be assumed that if it's free, they are making their
money some other way (i.e. they are selling you something indirectly).
But a free eBook does not require money per copy to produce, so its
quality cannot be judged based on the price (either way, check out
alphascript publishing).
Considering your target audience, I think it is a very large stretch to
think they don't understand this concept.
Besides, why can't the book's description say "Copy of the D online
documentation in kindle format"? How can anyone "judge" that to be crap?
This whole argument boggles my mind, there are no non-greed related
reasons to charge money for this book.
How about this, if you charge any amount of money more than 0, I guarantee
you will have less than 10% of the downloads than if you gave it away for
free. Plus you will alienate people who think they bought an actual D
book (or worse, think they are getting a deal on Andrei's book) and feel
like chumps. That should be great for D's image :P Iliekcakes will have
a field day on reddit...
-Steve

I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the
specification on the web site. Not only will it be convenient for those
who wish to peruse the spec using a kindle, it will be helpful for
marketing etc.
The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people
tend to equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be
taken seriously.

This notion is outdated. There are multiple free ebooks available on
iBook (the iPad/iPhone book store) and some of them are classics.
The thing is, the vast majority of people are not going to discover D via
Amazon, read the ebook spec, then go play with D by downloading the
compiler. The most likely scenario is:
1. Discovering D via word of mouth, or looking for alternatives to other
languages that have design flaws (like C++!)
2. Playing with the compiler, building programs, reading the online docs.
3. Wishing there was an ebook form of the documentation, and seeing one
exists via some link on the home page, or asking on the newsgroups.
At this point, do you really think that such a coder cares whether the
ebook is free? IMO making it *NOT* free is likely to turn off that coder
from D, since they likely are already familiar with the site, and they
will instantly know the ebook is just an automated reprint of the web site.

But if I put a price on it, people will be demotivated to continue
contributing to it, because they'll perceive someone else profiting from
their work.

This is not a big concern for me. I'd be more worried about D's
reputation being sullied by trying to make a profit out of obviously
freely available information.
My biggest concern with publishing a non-free book based on the web site
is that the *website changes with every release*!
Who wants to pay $5 every time the compiler is released just so you can
have an ebook-style copy of the web data?
Is it difficult to make an ebook for kindle? If it's automated, would the
automation be available as open source code? If so, why wouldn't people
just make their own ebook for kindle?
Technically, you could not stop someone else from doing this, since the
license is Boost, so what would you do if someone created a free version
with *exactly the same information* to compete with your non-free one?
My recommendation -- release it for free. There are zero reasons to
charge money for it.
-Steve

My biggest concern with publishing a non-free book based on the web site
is that the *website changes with every release*!
Who wants to pay $5 every time the compiler is released just so you can
have an ebook-style copy of the web data?

My biggest concern with publishing a non-free book based on the web site
is that the *website changes with every release*!
Who wants to pay $5 every time the compiler is released just so you can
have an ebook-style copy of the web data?

I think that's a good argument.

Yes. Personally, I would be very surprised to see a copy of online
documentation being sold as an e-book for money. And if you had to pay for it
again every time that there was an update, it would be that much worse. In the
case of Pro Git, it seems to me that it's not so much a case of online
documentation being sold for money but a book being given away for free
online. And if you'll notice, you can buy a paperback copy of Pro Git, so I
expect that the thinking that went into selling Pro Git for money was very
different. It probably ended up with a kindle edition to go with the paperback
book rather than to extend what was posted online. And most importantly, Pro
Git is an actual book which was written by one person and probably took a fair
bit of time and effort to write. It's not online documentation. It's an actual
book. Really, I think that it's a case of a book being given away for free
online instead of materials from online being put into a book. I don't think
that it's comparable to D's online documentation.
I do think that if you have an actual book, it looks bad if it's sold for free
(e.g. a free kindle copy of TDPL would probably not be a good idea), but I
also agree with Steven that it looks bad to sell online documentation. I
really think that it should be free. If someone wants a quality book that they
have to pay for, then they can buy TDPL. But selling online documentation
looks just plain bad IMHO, and if we make it clear that the e-book is a copy
of the online docs, then I don't think that the free factor will cause much in
the way of problems. If anything, it's the fact that it's online documentation
instead of an actual book which would cause problems.
- Jonathan M Davis

Are you sure? The "people" in "people ... are complete idiots" are the
subjects of the sentence, so surely the subjective case of who is
appropriate?

I'm pretty sure that who is the correct choice here for pretty much the reason
that you're giving, but it's the sort of thing that could get pretty
argumentative, so I didn't say anything. Whom really isn't used much these
days (though far more than thou or thy and their ilk), so it's more or less
dying out of the language, though plenty of the more literary folks still use
it. Personally, I think that life would be simpler without it, but it's not
completely gone yet.
- Jonathan M Davis

Are you sure? The "people" in "people ... are complete idiots" are the
subjects of the sentence, so surely the subjective case of who is
appropriate?
Torarin

Yes, "whom" was wrong there, but that was the punchline: someone who is
at the same time pretentious enough and dumb enough to say "whom" when
"who" is actually correct, is the same kin as someone who equates price
with quality.
I know, explained jokes suck...
Andrei

I just published it on Amazon. It'll take a couple days before it goes live, if
it survives their review process.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no option to make it free. While Amazon has
lots of free kindle books, they don't provide that option for self-publishers.
So, I picked the minimum price, which is $0.99. You can still download it free
from the website. I suppose the $.99 pays for the convenience of having Amazon
load it directly onto your Kindle.

Prices for european customers are different, as amazon already includes
the roaming fees. ("free international wireless delivery via Amazon
Whispernet" isn't actually free, it's included in the book
price.) Because of that many 'free' kindle books cost ~$0.40 in
germany. (Even if downloaded via WLan)
--=20
Johannes Pfau

Prices for european customers are different, as amazon already includes
the roaming fees. ("free international wireless delivery via Amazon
Whispernet" isn't actually free, it's included in the book
price.) Because of that many 'free' kindle books cost ~$0.40 in
germany. (Even if downloaded via WLan)

They charge for *internet* delivery?!?
Sounds like they're still up to their old "We *own* the concept of single
clicks" style of bullshit.

I think it would be a good move to make a kindle ebook out of the
specification on the web site. Not only will it be convenient for those who
wish to peruse the spec using a kindle, it will be helpful for marketing
etc.
The difficulty is that if I put the ebook up on Amazon for free, people
tend to equate free with "crap". It needs to have a price on it to be
taken seriously.
But if I put a price on it, people will be demotivated to continue
contributing to it, because they'll perceive someone else profiting from
their work.
Perhaps proceeds from it should be put towards other promotions of D, like
maybe a conference? More contests with prizes?
What do you all think? $0? $4.99? $9.99?
And yes, the content will be identical to that on the website, just
formatted for the kindle.

I've had the ebook on my kindle for a while now and read it cover to cover.
It's very readable in this form. The only problem I could see with it is
that some of the tables are not rendered properly. For example the Basic
Data Types table, the text is truncated by the grid. I tried different font
sizes and orientations but it didn't make much difference.
Anyway, its handy to have when your stuck on a airport with nothing to read
:-)
-=mike=-

I've had the ebook on my kindle for a while now and read it cover to cover.
It's very readable in this form. The only problem I could see with it is
that some of the tables are not rendered properly. For example the Basic
Data Types table, the text is truncated by the grid. I tried different font
sizes and orientations but it didn't make much difference.

We'll try to improve the formatting.

Anyway, its handy to have when your stuck on a airport with nothing to read
:-)